Bob le Flambeur

Bob (Roger Duchesne) is a gambler, living “in those moments between night and day, between heaven and hell.” He is also an ex-con with twenty years on the straight-and-narrow. Cleaned out after a bad run, Bob and his friends hatch a plan to rob a casino in the early hours of the morning. In the first of his caper films, Melville took the archetypes of the American film noir and infused them with a sleek, spare elegance and an impeccable continental style. Released four years before Breathless, Bob le Flambeur’s use of natural light, location shooting, and handheld cameras gestured ahead toward the French New Wave.